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Dec. 13, 2021

Journey of a Digital Nomad CTO

Journey of a Digital Nomad CTO

This week, Ryan chats with Jared Wesner, CTO at The Delta, a venture builder operating in Africa and Europe, about his digital nomad lifestyle and how he makes it work as a company leader.

Topics

  • Traveling in Eastern Europe
  • Ways to immerse yourself in new cultures while traveling
  • Digital nomad technology requirements
  • Figuring out insurance and taxes as a digital nomad
  • Working across time zones
  • Managing schedules and meetings for productivity
  • Addressing burnout and wellbeing as a leader

Connect with Jared: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-wesner

Meet Our Guest
Jared Wesner is the Chief Technology Officer at The Delta – a venture builder operating in Africa and Europe. He's passionate about building great ventures, as well as establishing, evolving, and leading development/engineering teams. He wants to build 100 ventures a year. Jared is currently living a new lifestyle as a nomad CTO while leading a team of 100+. Before that, he spent a lot of time in the architecture and development of FinTech & AutoTech systems. Connect with Jared to learn more about how he leads his team team remotely, and how an async culture has made them stronger than ever before.

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Transcript

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they're facing, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts for the digital workspace inner workings.

Welcome to the podcast. So where in the world are you?

Jared Wesner 0:35
Currently in Georgia has to think for a second in Georgia, and we've just gone you'll have to forgive my pronunciation. But we've just really like a week ago, we've actually left the Capitol. So it's a policy and in fact, we're in Kutaisi. Some of the guys take Kutaisi so I'm not too sure. I'm not actually sure what the exact pronunciation for the city is. I think it's like the third biggest city in Georgia. So Eastern Europe side. Yeah. And we're currently prepping our way for Saturday to move into Port dromey, which is near on the mountains where people go snowboarding and skiing and stuff. So prepping for like minus five degrees while working.

Ryan Purvis 1:20
Yeah, look, once once you guide to zero, you know, between minus five minus 10, it kind of feels the same. There's called called

Unknown Speaker 1:30
100%. I mean, I think I think the coldest we've been in it's probably like minus, like, for the say, we're going to be in good diary in Christmas near time, I think on average, it's minus seven at the moment. And it sounds like minus 15. So that'll be really interesting for us. If you've never experienced that, you know, you're coming from Cape Town, the weather's always kind of actually, other than it's windy. Most of the times it's windy, or you know, like or, like sunny or raining, but it's never like, I would say, truly rough weather or extremes. I mean, obviously, we do get just get really hot on the outskirts of Cape Town at least. But uh, you know, it's not like I would say like extremes where it's like minus 20 minus 30, things like that, where you know, your lifestyle changes other than a car. Um, so that is going to be interesting.

Ryan Purvis 2:24
And if you started your morning with the front of a clear or not

Unknown Speaker 2:27
with chatter, yes. It's called chatter in Georgia. I suppose it's not as it's not really bad, good for them. But we have once or twice, sometimes accidentally, one or two of the coffees. We can't You can't google translate the Georgian language live with, obviously, with Google Translate most other languages and countries you can just because there's a specific to or to them. So we've ordered a coffee before, you know with comes with alcohol for a nice morning meeting. But other than that, we have actually tried the church in the morning once or twice, on a trip to the next city, with the taxi driver stopping all four coffees and showing us that this is what you have to have what you have to do or what you have to have when you wake up.

Ryan Purvis 3:16
Yeah, my experience has been in Moscow where you have a shot in the morning, that sort of lady called you just can't get warm no matter what you do.

Unknown Speaker 3:24
Like Montenegro as well, they do it in their core, they do it in winter and summer, I think all the time, it's part of the culture is wake up have a have a have a shot of I think it's grappa. Yeah. And then your shot of an espresso, we're actually going to probably going to be in Russia and in second week in January, which we still haven't planned out, because I think it's directly in like, some of the corals times in the in the country. So that'll be very interesting verse,

Ryan Purvis 3:58
which, which further off you're gonna go to.

Unknown Speaker 4:02
I think we've, we're not going to stay very long. So I think we're gonna going to be there for two to three weeks. And I, as far as I understand ideas to kind of do St. Petersburg and Moscow, which I think is pretty much what everyone does. I'm not sure. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 4:18
Two to three weeks is quite a long time in Russia.

Unknown Speaker 4:22
Well, I mean, if you have to, you have to cater for the fact that we work, you know, get like 100%, Monday to Friday, so like the rest of the time is actually inside working. And then Saturdays are mostly our days to explore. So that means we only have like three Saturdays to actually sport and some of you know three quarters of the Sunday basically, the rest of the time is actually dedicated to either planning out the weekend or picking up work most of the time, so you know, the lifestyle the lifestyle is a bit different. So sometimes we would stay longer in a country that may not make sense for a person traveling for like maybe like touring or something like that, just because we we burn a lot of our time. Working on actually seeing the country.

Ryan Purvis 5:03
Yeah, look, you got it. You got to see the Kremlin. That is that is something that it's really, really, really inspiring. That's not the right word. But but to see an obvious casting about it, it's just, it's just different. Yeah. And I'll let you decide when once you've seen it, you can tell me what you thought of it. Definitely. Yeah. So Peter, it would be just to get my wife there with the kids, I think. But I think with architecture, the best one?

Unknown Speaker 5:35
Yeah, I mean, the pictures are amazing, I just don't know, to what extent we're going to be able to enjoy it. In fact, like, for the type of like, weather that they get during that time. So that's a kind of a bit of a worry, I have, I guess, that we're not gonna We're not probably geared up for it. But I mean, it's not something you can fix by going to a shop. And we have a lot of, we have a lot of, let's say, warm clothing, because we're in winter in Georgia at the moment. And, you know, in two weeks or three weeks time anyway, when we buy the good specie mountains are 12 kilometers away from the Russian border. But I think it is a bit different being there. And largely, I think, I think one or two things like the criminal, it's definitely something on our list. And then I think the governor wants to have or see, wants to see the Russian ballet ballet. So for so birthday during that time at the way there is I think that's going to be very different birth experience.

Ryan Purvis 6:27
Berlin bridge, we've jumped ahead into what you what you're doing, we may wish to start with introduction introducing who you are. Yeah. I've only asked you the question was a digital workspace mean to you, but I think you can explain more about what remote working means to you.

Unknown Speaker 6:43
Where, well, I am a CTO and co founder of the delta. So weird corporate venture builder. The interesting conversation of how you guys met was largely related along like the fact that we're pushing heavily into asynchronous and remote work, just during COVID time speaker within like a year from like, you know, 25 to around around 80 to 100 individuals, plus or minus a few months. And I think a lot of that growth was during like the COVID times and having to do this remotely, and learn and really, like re relearn and rethink ways of work, basically. I hope that's a pretty decent intro.

Ryan Purvis 7:24
No, it's a good it's a great because that's that's exactly I think that's when I found you on LinkedIn, you were sort of going on this route of how you've how you've done this, and, and, as you mentioned directly with your girlfriend, you're traveling, when we spoke last time you were thinking in Cape Town going to Durban which is not a big trick, because there's no, it's Georgia.

Unknown Speaker 7:46
Yeah, I think we had just come back from like the first six months of this whole. So I mean, we started like more of like this remote working, or hybrid working, or mostly, like, let's say remote working, probably 18 months, 1019 months ago, and March this year, is when we left to travel and work remotely, specifically in a weird time, because I think at that time, South Africa was going back into a lockdown, I think, again, again, and we had just made it up. But a lot of the countries were not supposed to lock down. So it was quite tough for us to figure out where we would be traveling. And we just decided to do this, we just, you know, we kind of pretty much as I guess I mentioned in one post that you probably saw was we basically just sold everything, our lease was coming to the end, we were tired of working in the flat, we were working 200 hours, 240 hours a month. For the last year during the COVID times as we were scaling the business, we're sick of seeing the same walls. It was COVID lockdown or spare time. I think people were going through in South Africa nice, like many different like bottle stores and different types of closures. So I suppose it was like, there's a lot going on. Things were quite hectic for I think they were the world in the country. And then soon as that it kind of opened up, we made this decision to well, if we're going to be working all this time, you might as well be working from a different country as we do this. So yeah, we pretty much packed up everything, sold everything out as much as we could. I think we've got a few small things left in a storage locker somewhere, South Africa that we still need to deal with, we have no idea what we going to do with it just yet. So it's coming. And we left and six months later, I guess we had been to like five countries already. And then we had come back to Cape Town and to reset for winter, weirdly enough, because we had traveled through the summertime for Europe, at least, or Eastern Europe. And that's kind of when we had our first conversation, I think.

Ryan Purvis 9:42
Yeah, it sounds about right. And I totally agree with what you're doing. It really wasn't so difficult to move the kids around. We would have done something similar. And we did it I mean we here in South Africa, but we're in South Africa. Well, our family it's so it's not It's not the UK where we normally live. But we're in a house that we rented, you know, that kind of stuff. And we're here for a year now, funnily enough. Yeah. But, you know, we've made, we've made the effort to go and see a lot of South Africa that we wouldn't have seen, you know, if we just came back for for two week holiday, because you know, that you don't have the time to get down to, you know, wherever it is, you need to go. You know, the short. I mean,

Unknown Speaker 10:26
I mean, on that point, Sam, like, our mindset has kind of changed. But we were, if you think about it, you're like, you realize you actually kind of in a rut, I mean, because everything was coming around you. And like, it was easy to get to if you wanted to do it, we weren't really going out and seeing we I mean, we my like friend, group and family and his friend, group and family as well, like, they are largely people that, you know, go and stay in places I've seen. So Africa, you know, we go, we went to, we still went away every few months for a weekend or something like that, and try to see different places and go to new places and see South Africa, but not to the depth of like getting on the red bus or the blue bus. And other than if it involves wine, drink, wine, farm tea, or wine tasting and one on one conferencing, you didn't really spend a lot of time with the South African culture to be honest, kind of outside, it's in a weird way. And having traveled to this to these countries, and like the first thing I would say not forced to do, but something I was doing the first day we get, you know, it's always terrible, because like when we travel, it's mostly 24 hours to get you it's like, you know, live in 12 hour flights to 16 hour flight, sometimes depending on where we going, which takes a lot of toll in between, you know, on weekends when you're working on the Monday already. And what we do is we go to like these, like this free walking tours. And what that does is kind of give you a really big oversight into the culture, and the country. And the just like nuances to stuff as well in a very unformed, informal. Like, let's say way, and from there, we start to like focus down on a lot of the cultural aspects as well, which is something I probably wouldn't be as interested in. I don't really do technically, like South Africa, either. Now, going back is such a little time as well, you start to switch realizing, you know, you've been kind of lazy to experience what you know, South Africa may also have to offer and slightly, maybe ignorance about it.

Ryan Purvis 12:20
Yeah, you're spot on. I mean, and the reason why I sort of know, a little bit of my bad boss go through, for example, is every time I go somewhere new, I go for a run in the morning, sort of five or six in the morning, just when the sun's coming up, and sort of explore the hotel or whatever is around just to see stuff. Because you you know, when you're working, you just kind of, as you say, go into the rat of eats the work, maybe something, and you might go for dinner, but then usually dinner somewhere. Depending on how you've been hosted. It's normally the best scenario, like the best place they would take your you don't discussing stuff I've seen out of your comfort zone. Exactly, exactly. I mean, I remember doing a trip to Saudi. And I was in I think I was in Riyadh. And the guys took me for a traditional lunch. And it was so so weird and awesome at the same time, because, you know, they don't sit on chairs and tables on the floor, you know, the important pots on the ground using your fingers eat, obviously, things you wouldn't be doing right now during COVID. But it was, it was a cool experience. And it was because I said that I'm so sick and tired of you guys taking me to Wendy's or to JF or whatever, Mary, American restaurants and Saudi traditional food.

Unknown Speaker 13:37
And that's also like another thing that I've had to like, I suppose, get become more flexible and get out of my comfort zone is I've got a very, very small, tight comfort zone when it comes to like food and like the cultural aspects of Not, not the cultural aspects, but like types of food and things like that. So I'm a pretty fussy eater, I guess. And now over the last while I've been forced to one because of just accessing certain types of food, but also like, trying to get out of our out of our way and out of our mindsets like experience the local food and the local cuisines. And like the ways the culture and we would always go to try stuff in like, let's say more structured environments, like you mentioned, like on tours, where it's like a bit more comfortable. And I think two things have helped a lot like, like, especially in Georgia, we've got like friends also from South Africa. They're the couples also here and they, I mean, they've kind of pretty much immigrating in a weird way to Georgia. And we've got to spend some time with them as well. And again, it's in like a bit like informal environment getting closer to like, the individuals around around you. We started spending more time again, as was another thing I guess we were traveling with COVID. So there was a lot that we couldn't do. And we will have to go back to some of the countries like Turkey and stuff we were traveling and it was locked on for everyone. So you could really experience a lot of the culture you could only see the sights and do the touristy things, but so that's kind of something we missed out on one or two countries like Ukraine as well. But we've really really enjoyed it now in Georgia, because it's a bit, I guess, a little bit less hectic and no, like vaccinated and stuff like that. So you're slightly less on guard, I guess. And we've really got to just enjoy the informal environment and how it would be from their cultural viewpoints, which has been reduced has been awesome, really. And you learn a lot, you learn a lot of every single place. And you also learn that, you know, like, everyone knows this, I guess. But like you always ignorant about it, which is as long as green on every side, like everyone's like, in South Africa is terrible, we should leave every single country, which means for the last, like, seven months or whatever, has had political issues had a lot. I mean, I suppose we've traveled to a few Soviet beat, you know, Soviet base countries, but like, so post Soviet areas, but like, they've all got corruption, they've all got issues, they've all got access, to access to like, I think we've bought water for the last seven months, because the locals have told us not to drink the water, even though they've got like access to the best things in the country almost. But like the pipes, and the systems just don't work well. So like, even though, even though they're Western, you know, like European countries, and there's like different types of infrastructure that we really like, and the stuff that we don't like, there's always this comparison to like, how comfortable we are with like, the access to what South Africa have, or at least what keeps on us. So that's also made us really, you know, appreciate where we stay, as well. Yeah, it's funny,

Ryan Purvis 16:27
because that's the exact conversation I had with friends of mine here with a thought so much better outside of not so do you know, you could look at any country in the world and find a riot protest some corruption, you know, or some problem that you think is worse than than where you are right now. And it's and the reality is, we're all going through every country is going through its own stuff at the moment. Yeah, have you handled things like your your your connectivity, like your internet, your phones, I mean, I used or using your cell African stuff, or you switch to Google Voice or something.

Unknown Speaker 17:02
So this, this, this actually switches over to, like, becoming more of what I would, I guess, like six months, six months, you know, five months in we kind of rebranded our thoughts of way we like way we manage like a way that we were communicating what we were doing into more of like a nomadic lifestyle, like lifestyle on the time we did that was, initially we were doing remote work, which law companies was doing or working remotely. We're working in the South African time zones. Everyone. Most of the company works from Joburg and Cape Town, we've got owner 2323, we had sorry, we had one or two or three people in like Europe, or new UK, which was working on South Africans, timezone. And during this during that, you know, from March last year, the switchover started to happen of like, really driving, as we scaled to about 80, we, you start to feel like the rigidity of certain things is what the rigidity I guess, but you can feel rigidity within the system that you've built states. And you can feel that stuff needs to start changing. And you start to, you know, like evaluate audits a lot, what needs to change in order for you guys to get like for your company, and you guys to get to the next step. And to link this back to what you asked me, largely, we started working on these remote processes, we became more nomadic. And what I mean by nomadic is like we've finally switched over to the realization that when you're out of the country, after two or three months, things start to change, right? So like, if you're going to plan on doing this, at that point in time, we didn't know we're going to do this for longer, we actually just we're going to go for a few months and see, see what it is and see what if it works. But because I started working really like really, really started enjoying what we're doing. We started switching over stuff that needed to be switched over some of the stuff we have done completely. And some of you haven't done just yet. An example being like connectivity, like we don't really use and or closed off our, you know, local cell phone numbers, I think mine is still running just so that I can keep my number for now. But we like close those off. And in every country we go to we actually the first thing we do as we get off the we've learnt us twice now. So the first thing we do, even if it's expensive or 50 meters by some god, there are other options. There's like he swims in the sunset, you can like get the book in like 165 countries or whatever. But to be honest, in Eastern Europe, at least the internet is so cheap, it's like ridiculous you can get I think we have an unlimited SIM card right now in the country for like two months, or three months. We assume that's when Yeah, unlimited SIM card costs as a cost 30 Georgian glory, which is times like five for South African rand. So it cost you between like 100 to 250 200 grand for unlimited data. Obviously, there's certain data limits of streaming this like to download, but for work for like remote working, it's perfect. And there's 4g, and I think there'll be 5g at some point. So every country has been like this, I think Montenegro it was like 150 ran for 500 gigs at full speed, so that every country access that we've been to at least we first do a lot of research on access to internet and that's kind of what that's at the moment. The main criteria of us going there, and obviously getting in from a visa All possible things. So that's a secondary thing. But primarily, we focus on internet connectivity. We ask every single Airbnb for speed tests. And it's only quarters as one. So I think so like we very like obsessive over like internet access, because that is the primary for that. At the moment here in Georgia, I think in the city that I'm in right now, this is probably the worst, it's been like 25 minutes, which is workable, it's okay. It's not the most amazing. And there's like, we've got a simple, we've got like three SIM cards, one for a wireless modem that we bring and take with us. Always just because, you know, say the network or the router doesn't work at the Airbnb where we're at, we can't really stop things. And then we have some cards, basically, and most times, it's been fine. We've had relatively no issue other than two weeks that we're into Turkey, and they had locked out for non tourists. So the entire country is in lockdown. And all shops were closed other than supermarkets and some cards were non essential. So for two weeks, we had to use the Wi Fi from the hotel, and it was the worst in the world. So other than that, we've been, we've been okay.

Ryan Purvis 21:05
Yeah, and the problem with using the hotel Wi Fi is that it's obviously not secured, that I could add a VPN on top of that, that just to make sure you build with

Unknown Speaker 21:14
it, not even, I mean, not even just that, I mean, we like to have MDM like get like MDM software. So you have like device management software with like antivirus. And then you have a VPN on top of that, so that you're secure. And it all adds to like the bandwidth capabilities of what you're doing. And then you have these video calls and you're trying to make either like you're doing interviews or sales on managing a team, it's really awkward to manage a team of like, you know, 60 people, if you have like all hands or whatever, and they're struggling to hear what you're trying to make, like a, you know, a serious point or like a real point or whatever. So it's definitely, you know, like the key requirement to this whole thing, and this whole system working

Ryan Purvis 21:51
is because so I've got a Vodacom Vodafone SIM card, which gives me 160 countries, I think global roommates. So my fallback is usually that and that worked out pretty well. And it's kind of in the price range that you're saying, a little bit more expensive, but I'm probably paying about 40 quid a month. So that's, but that turns about 2800 rent, so. So it's a little more expensive than what you're saying. But then I don't worry about carrying a phone with me another device will be as you know, as a norm. But I do grab the local some often because it's, you know, some benefits to having a local, some friendly people and, and that sort of book book a dinner or something like that.

Unknown Speaker 22:32
Yeah, and I think I think the main point, I guess, the one thing I have to stress is, I mean, the viewpoint I'm saying right now is limited to like the fact that we've been really focusing for the first iteration of our trip in the Balkan areas and like the, you know, the Eastern Europe side, and when we were like in Italy, and like France, and like UK, or some clouds from South Africa worked and obviously there's roaming and whatever, but like, like access to internet wasn't really an issue. Because there is like, what do you pull into integration between these and you can actually use your SIM cards. Whereas MTN does not work in like pretty much most of the bulk on Amazon, I have an instance and part doesn't work in most of the most of the countries we've been in, in the spoken space. So I guess it's it's limited, so don't take it take anything and say anything to hide fully as a global fact. But um, the one thing I am hoping is like the nomadic type of structure, I mean, the biggest problems is like internet like visas and passports, and like digital passports and nomadic nomadic insurance. So the one other topic, I guess I can tell you this, we actually remove, closed our insurance, health insurance, just because again, after two to three months, it only covers you for two to three months, I've been out of the country. So he's like start staying out of the country longer than that. It's not that anymore. So there's actually this really cool, nomadic health insurance company that we are ready to to now. So now we don't have to worry, we can travel pretty much in most countries, I think 80 90% of the countries and we're covered which is pretty awesome. So a lot of the stuff and it's actually cheaper than our local health insurance. So we've had to like change over a lot of things as we've gotten in order to save to kind of sustain this. The last thing is like tax residency, which is something I'm working on

Ryan Purvis 24:17
currently. So which provided to us other than just your health insurance

Unknown Speaker 24:23
you know, put me on the spot I'll grab it while we're talking. So that's that's currently getting grabbed that ends it's

Ryan Purvis 24:32
good for them at all. I'm just curious because we ended up we looked at a few safe safety.

Unknown Speaker 24:37
I think safety ring Yes. Yeah. You gave me a second I just put me on the spot. So safety me and again, friends. A few friends have been been nomadic longer than I have. And they've been traveling around the world like insanely while working there. They were the ones who passed this one on to us. That, you know, seems to be exactly what we need.

Ryan Purvis 24:56
Yeah, we tried doing so they didn't have any more space on the medical so we ended up Cigna. And that works out roughly the same as what I was paying discovery here. It was about 100 pounds difference per month. So vastly cheaper than what I'm what I would have been paying for the equivalent in the UK.

Unknown Speaker 25:17
Yeah, I mean, I'm not too sure if like the status of the UK, but I do know, like, if I turn to my discovery insurance, it is it is roughly the same price for and I think you get more because I mean, in the end, that's just like a number. Basically, they cover you for like $5 million, which, if you're in most countries, other than the US, it's enough for what, you know, for any major, you know, things that may occur. So. So I think, I think it's relatively okay. And you're more comfortable. But yeah, like a lot of change, like, like I said, like, well, it's like, like, you know, normal insurance as well, we had to deal with our insurance, we had to get special insurance from South Africa that allows us to cover some of us devices, because we're out of the country most of the time. And normal insurance doesn't work for that. So there's a lot of small, like, nuances to actually being nomadic. And like I mentioned, the biggest one now is tax. And how to deal with that, because for the next few years, we're probably not going to be in our country for more than two months. Max. So it was like, what do you do? Do you now leave it and just pay South African tax? Or do you, you know, not pay South African tax and start to make changes? Do you potentially immigrate to another country? Specifically, I don't know from your side, we're a South African citizens, and we only have South African passports. And that's another, you know, pain point for us truly being nomadic and being able to get into other countries. So visas is a big thing for us to be able to, you know, travel.

Ryan Purvis 26:46
Like one on the tax front, all I can say is that I pay tax in both countries at the moment, because that's the, that's the and then what I do is I paid in, and I try and claim it back at the end when I do my assessments based on how many days in and out of the country. So that's, that's the only thing I could tell you. And then on the other thing, was the other thing, sorry, I lost my train of thought that he was, you mentioned something about often tax, you said something else. Oh, the insurances. And so device insurance is a bit of a pain because, like all my insurances in the UK, but they won't cover me for like a broken phone here. But if I lose my phone, yeah, and because we were planning to go back in February, I haven't cancelled anything. And I haven't fixed anything, because I thought, well, I'll just fix it when I get back in February. But now that's the king like it might be March. So now debating, I'll just go fix the phone, and then just take the hit. Whereas my insurance would have covered it. Yeah. Now we'll take the hit.

Unknown Speaker 27:54
So So I mean, that those are the things that you know, that show up in well, like show up while you do these things. And like also, like, if you're what's really, really nice, and I suppose a lot of other people would be affected by this as like, if you normally doing this, and like you have to change your flights and stuff. And it's like a lot of penalties behind that all this cancellations or there's a COVID risk of something that happens unforeseen events, you normally have to like take the hit, or if you had normal insurance, or travel at free and travel insurance, basically, most of the like the premium banks like offer, they would come in these things was now like, we're so lucky that like the like the airlines that we use and stuff like that have these COVID policies, because it's been a COVID time, and we wondering now like when they're not, how's it going to work? Because then you're gonna have to add another level of like, I mean, it depends on how much you're traveling and whatever. But at half ahead of time you planning and rescue are but like, you know, you still have another thing where you may at times have to cancel something and take it over over a plane ticket or something like that. So you never really, you're not never, like we're not 100% sure what it's going to look like post COVID, I guess on what else we have to actually deal with if we continue this?

Ryan Purvis 29:07
Well, I mean, we've seen that we you know, the stupidity that the UK government's been through recently, people that have been people coming on holiday, and wherever in Africa on holiday to like it was these guys events all over the news on their honeymoon. And while they were away, this this this flag Black Flag banners come in. Now they now they're sitting with a situation where they've spent X number of pounds on a holiday. And now they have to spend more but number of pounds on quarantine that they hadn't planned for. That's been imposed imposed on them. You know, when the government told them they could go away. You know, they've been told they have to quarantine and in a hotel. So there's those those and most travel insurances won't cover that anymore. It would have covered it before. But if you're traveling during the pandemic, they won't cover it.

Unknown Speaker 29:58
Yeah, so I mean, they're like Like I said, there's there's so many nuances in that, like as we've been doing this, and it's linked us back to like, like the thinking of delta and like being a venture builder and you know, focusing on building ventures, the one thing that keeps circling our mind is a good friend of mine is like, like, are we going to take down a lot of these things and sort of figure out how do we solve these for like nomads, people that are traveling and working remotely, because I think like the future of this, art is flexibility. It is like being able to move around in different areas of the world, experiencing different cuisines experiencing different people, which have been amazing, by the way, like we've we've been so surprised by some people we've met over the last, you know, countries like Montenegro, Ukraine, Turkey, North Macedonia, really weird country. But, you know, we've been to Italy, in France and Greece, and like, like, we're in Georgia now. And we're going to Russian, at every point in time, mostly other than the French, we've had really friendly, really friendly experiences and really amazing experiences will give that will give the French another try at some point. But like, yeah, like people have been amazing. I think the future of a study like that, I think as we become more flexible in the ways work, companies have a pushing this, the one of my biggest inspirations is like get labs and there is a lot to learn, try to read a lot of their stuff and learn from that stuff. Because we like a lot, they've figured out a bunch of stuff ahead of time that we haven't figured out yet as we're scaling as a company. And they're doing so amazing when it comes to like truly fully remote, where, you know, the entire operation runs globally, remotely, and provide the flexibility to their teams to work from wherever and kind of fit into the schedules that make sense for them, which we saw during COVID times people like pushed into working more because they didn't have to work drive those two hours. So it's not like they reposition those two hours to go watch movies or whatever, they actually ended up spending more that time with the stuff that they really enjoy or the tasks that they really enjoyed within our ecosystem, which even chose to like or just proves the point of why having flexibility and systems that allow that it's not an easy thing to do, but like having systems that allow that kind of make, it makes so much sense for company. And it's again, again, proven off what we've been doing today.

Ryan Purvis 32:18
So talk to me about about your working days. And as you move timezones and that have been how do you handle that sort of synchronous and asynchronous work?

Unknown Speaker 32:29
I would like to, I would, I wish I could say very well, but it's it's been it's been quite quite an uphill battle. Sometimes, then, I guess one of the most interesting things I can say, two dates is we got to Georgia. And for the first time in my life, that's plus four. So we like to outside of South Africa. For the first time in my life, I've struggled to actually get out of out of the South African timezone. So no matter what we tried, we're still waking up at like, like, not eight, nine, in Georgia time, which is like, you know, six, seven, by South Africa's time, and we really our work days would have normally been around eight onwards, it's quite late at night, sometimes in, in South Africa. And we've been working basically in the South African Samson, this specific area, luckily, the GA and culture. And I think that's the reason why we're struggling to do this is because the georgeanna culture, they only open up the shops at 10. Anyway, which is it's in our country, which is kind of weird, but so weirdly enough, for this specific case, it actually works out specifically when we're done with like, what we're doing, or whatever, whatever we're doing whatever meetings. But let me, let me just get back to the point. So we've been, we haven't been out of crazy times, it's just that next year will be like our biggest time. So we will be will be like, you know, four hours of South Africa. And we haven't really pushed for that just yet. Because I don't think our company was mature enough, not from a system perspective to be able to, to manage that variation of, let's say, leadership working in different time zones, as we're scaling. And I guess there's something it's like, as a, I guess, caveats or something just like disclaimer, I mean, we're are like, you know, a leader in the company. I'm a co founder. So like my obligations and accountability is very different to someone just normally working for the company. So that means that I do put in a lot of extra time because it matters to me, it's something I love doing one, but also it's my responsibility to make things make sure things are going right from the area that I focus on in in delta. So just that as a disclaimer, it does mean that my work days are largely quite full. And you know, sometimes 10 to 14 hours a day type of things or more potentially sometimes when things are hectic. But to get back to this like asynchronous and timezone stuff. To date over the few countries it's been relatively easy because we've been an hour or two ahead ahead of the times. It's really amazing. No difference. To be honest, the only thing is like when we hit the cut time. So there's a few things on a checklist that you have to like reset, which, for example, I use Calendly to manage any bookings that come into my, into my calendar. Regardless, regardless, regardless of who it is, whether it's external and internal, obviously, our internal systems, we use G Suite so everyone can see. But there's been small changes I've made like the system month by month. So for example, G Suite calendar, so Google calendar I have there, they allow you to set up two different time zones on the left of when you're looking for what time it is when you're citing time. So I'll have my current time zone, I'll have the I'll have the head office time, so that South African time so that helps me kind of streamline finding time between South Africa and you know, where I am right now, in my time zone, I often to date have very to stay within the time, so there are times or South Africans timezone. But that doesn't mean our clients aren't around the world and are in different time zones, and a head will be a lot behind us. So again, when she laughed about with the candidly, I got the first country, and it was an hour hour to two hours hours, I can't remember exactly what it was. But I was just not getting bookings for certain timeframes. And that was because candidly, it was playing havoc with my calendar itself being in two different time zones and the settings, because you can set a whole bunch of different like, complexities behind, like, what type of booking whether it's an interview for 15 minutes, screening calls, or whether it's a external meeting, or client meeting, I send different links to different people. And they have different places when I've chosen time in my diary that you can meet with me. And some of them landed up having no one for two weeks interview with me. And I couldn't figure out why no one wanted to chat with me. And that was largely because the calendar Academy was still on the South African base, and it could just couldn't find anything that wasn't a cache.

Unknown Speaker 36:44
So there is some tools behind it, there's some changes that have to happen across what you're doing. And ultimately, ultimately, depending on the the team working times, because we've become when before we went, it was purely just that save fully remote, but nine to five, as an example. And everyone was kind of super committed to working nine to five, aka, post certain times. That's kind of when they would stop accepting meetings and say, sorry, you know, this is a good supper or whatever. As we progress over the last few months, we've gotten better systems better ways acclimatized to like working asynchronously. And to that that has also changed my diary quite a lot in the fact that time zones become less of an issue. It's more about compromising when certain people and systems are working. So probably a better way to explain this is some leadership work, whenever something is needed, aka their time slot is open. So if I have a meeting with the CEO, and it's at 10 o'clock at night with me, and it's 8pm, then it doesn't really matter if it's 12pm tomorrow with me, and it's something important. And it's 10pm, there, it doesn't really matter, we'll have the meeting, depending on its urgency, and whether it can't be the next day. And that's a better timeframe, if you're not tired or whatever, well I'm out of works by my schedule would have been quite different. So I might be working from 10am to, you know, 12:12pm or whatever, one day or and working from a different time. On my for example, Wednesdays, I might sleep in a bit or wake up earlier. So you start to change the cycle of when you're working and you start to reprogram how you manage your calendar, and when and using the tools that like different systems provide you to set slots on when one on ones can happen when when interviews can happen. And then making sure that you also don't too rigid so that you can have flexibility in, in, in the system and allowing, you know changes to that. So you know, if they something really can't work, you're not gonna be like sorry, no, I've worked from nine to five or nine to five today, so I can't have your meeting. So that coupled with the team starting to change when they work, there's a bunch of people in engineering, and we all know that a lot of engineers wake up late. So most of my team effectively wake up at the times that I'm pretty productive, which is from like nine South African time onwards, right? Nine to 10. And they work too late. So it actually it actually starts to work out in a weird way, depending on who you're working with, depending on the foot like the focus group. So the time zone start to blur away in a bit, if that makes sense at all. Complete could be complete nonsense, I'm telling you. But largely because stuff becomes more asynchronous. And people focus try to focus less on meetings and prep earlier earlier beforehand, send me messages. And if you can't figure out how to deal with something through messages and videos and stuff like that, in your own time, then you have like meetings and obviously there's certain things asynchronous that you kind of need to have a meeting and it's like so you'll so what I kind of do at the moment which probably again, there's probably many different algorithms to optimize this which I just really haven't had the time to think about a foot but I anchor my my work days around call meetings that have to happen which may be client based ones or maybe like my my top three important things that I need to focus on in the week. And then my Canada's anchored around that and then I'll slot in other stuff on the the timeframes that I think are more effective for me to work on. And then also just be very serious about when to block out certain time. Like, I think I went for two, three weeks about taking lunch. And, or even a pee break, basically, because it's just next meeting next meeting next meeting, because people had a chat to me, I needed my time or whatever. And then you started ahead of time started book Bogaard focus points. And then we've also added something recently that someone very close to us and in the team has kind of passed on which something called clockwise. And if all the entire team are using it, it starts to try move meetings around, asynchronously across all your different calendars and block out lunch times and block up like focus time so that you can get work done properly, which is something really cool. So I think we're going to take that concept and potentially rebuild it for ourselves as delta and scale it so that it's one data, not a data privacy risk for us. But to we can modify it to understand more context and our systems. An exam example is this calendar clockwise doesn't understand which meeting may be more important from a client meeting. But the way that did Delta approaches problems, we have a lot of data and like we take a lot of notes and tag a lot of things from risk scorecards and stuff like that inside our internal systems, which means we have access and information about what is really, really important. And and if you think about it, if you tie your calendar up to that your candidate can be with more smarter, but when you should be doing so. So we we take we do take a very, let's say I guess programmatic approach to like how to solve a lot of these problems, and try to relook at them. Rather than just using the tool that was given to you by Google or the tool that was given to you by whatever, like a timezone.

Ryan Purvis 41:39
Yeah, there's a couple things you've said that I can resonate with. So you know, because I'm two hours ahead of the UK. But I've got guys in India, guys and UK guys in the US, my day tends to be, you know, fairly, fairly long. And so what I do the same thing, I've worked over certain meetings that are in a meeting, so you know, daily stand ups for the, for the morning of the night, for example. And then I kind of work a day or two shifts, where I've got, you know, the focus of the Indian and UK in the morning, and they got the focus of the US in the evenings. And then I fit my life in the middle as I've called them sort of integrated working. And then, and then I've and then I've blocked out, you know, slots where I go to gym or take my wife to the doctor, whatever, whatever, the last couple of weeks. And then also time to pick the kids up due to dinner with them, that sort of stuff. So, you know, at the end of the day, my day isn't driven just by by meetings, but I'm almost tired. This is a productivity thing, you time block specific tasks, and specific activities into your diary. So don't always look full. And which is a problem because we want to book a meeting with you like finding space in your diary. But that's almost the right behaviors. Because yeah, you need to you need to you need to make sure that when someone was telling your diary, they're not just rounding stuff in, because they want to just talk to you for 15 minutes, when they could use a an instant messenger or, or an email, you can write reasons. So

Unknown Speaker 43:07
you use the real word which I've probably wobbled around explaining how I've done it versus just saying productivity management, which is really what it is. The difference is like, there's like depth to that, and what you learn from it. An example being I don't go to stand ups anymore, I used to go to the we had like 10 Ventures running, we could go to stand ups like as leadership. And like you need a lot of you need to know what's going on to those 10. But let's assume it's only 10 projects that are generating revenue for your company, you need to know what's going on on those projects, the best way to find out what's going on is going to stand ups, right. But that works for a company that works for 95 company that worked for a company that's hybrid or whatever, it doesn't really work. And you can argue that okay, cool, but if you document what's in the stand up, you'll have be able to read the notes and know what's going on. Yes, but why do you like, and you can also debate like, oh, cool, but having the startup as a sort of part of culture and whatever. But like, the way I've approached it recently is we have like a bot that manages startups across the company. So everyone is streaming information of what they're doing and any problems and how they feeling daily basically. And then what we do from that is like the standups only happen in those teams if they want to have synchronous setups or meetings there. So you don't actually have any stand up meetings, and this team wants to have that. And at that point in time, they'll just talk about the main items that they want to read from the actual book notes that gets sent to everyone and everyone has access to and can discuss some things and we'd rather use that time to spend building relationships and or cultural aspects and or solving someone's problem. So you start to redefine just like what you used to do just because a certain methodology tells you you have to have a stand up and this does a certain it's done in a certain way. So we started to migrate, like migrate a lot of that into a different type of approach, access to the information from any time we need because like you're using those words and you're like saying what to do In which what's blocking, you can build tools that like pick up on the blockers and like highlight the blockers to, to lead like leadership, which means you don't have to stress about not being in the meetings or reading certain stuff, because the ones that the risk based ones can show up. And if you do want to stop by and understand what's going on in the project, you could just read the central, like, let's say, the central login for what is happening in the team. So that starts to like, design like feedback loops. And we do that for like stand ups. We do that for feedback. So like, if anyone has that we like continuously ask, remind for feedback, but also have a way for you just to do it at that given point in time, when you need to give feedback, you've just experienced something. Orion is like spoken to me really badly and could have handled something better. And then I'll be able to like write up feedback for it and like send it to him or set up time to discuss the feedback. So you'd say like feedback, right, and dah dah dah, dah, dah, keep the nodes server meeting for last 10 with 10 minutes each somewhere in your diaries, that makes sense. And you'll have a conversation about that feedback, how to improve from both sides. So like we try and we're getting to the feedback part of that like system I just told you about. But it's stuff we've been thinking about at scale, because like I said, 1010 projects easy as a leader to be part of that. If you have 10 leaders, and you have 100 Ventures, which is what our plan is, and I'll go on, we're not very far from this. A lot of the original thinking a lot like the or that say the copy paste stuff on the internet, like doesn't work. So okay, do stand ups. And this way, it doesn't work for you. And it also doesn't build the tools of help your leaders manage their teams at all, like lead their teams manage the teams. So like, that's one, and then I'm just like linking it back along that one flow. But fundamentally, that produces a lot of like, that takes 10 steps away from all of your calendar, right, and you only go and check in on the stuff that matters. Then also the timezone. If you think about it, because we have different time zones, we'd have stand ups across basically four or five different countries before it, we know that you can focus in the US like you have to, that's a different, that's a different. It's a different conversation. But for at least for our space, we like the rest of it kind of makes sense. It's okay. And people are working in different time zones, people you have access to like their profiles and information if something's urgent. And then the next thing there is we I pre plan appointment Blackstar. So I understand really why I like the appointment, things make sense. So ahead of time, I have non negotiable focus time, but if it's urgent, there's like, so operating like way that everyone knows, like, okay, cool, they'll still put the meeting in front of another meeting I have. And like, I will know, it's important, I'll move it around to when I can actually make it or whatever. But then also making time. There's one other thing we have to like you kind of have to focus on on this type of process is actually still making because your calendar, so pre planned, and it's super booked all the time. And I think I should have posted on this as well, if explaining to people like calculating my calendar was before COVID. And the funny thing to this is my calendar will look slightly similar, aka still fully booked,

Unknown Speaker 47:51
post learning all these things, because like you mentioned, you pre booking things. But the main thing I think I also learned from that is what happens is the rest of the team, don't try to make meetings with you and try to solve things because they worried that you don't have the time, but you're so busy with your calendar. So they're also being very strategic and very smart about like, how that perception and that perspective can be like, portrayed within the rest of the team. So then there's like, I use the appointment based calendar item on Google Suite, to open up space for, like Bergeon conversations with the team or urgent conversations with clients potentially. But mostly, these are focused on the team, because the team comes first. Or I'll you know, employees come first. So like that, like at least allows us space for people to reach out. And they know I will prioritize this time or they know that like they're not going to feel bad because it's like I've got my can I'm just so full. And I'm so busy. And I think that's a very important point, I guess.

Ryan Purvis 48:54
Yeah, look, I mean, it all comes down to communication. Yeah, you know, we have our and also gonna to daily stand ups on our side. And those are relatively quick. But it gives the guys time to do whatever they need to do in that meeting, if there's a need to have a conversation about something, you know, keep the stand up pretty quick. But then you say, Okay, fine, we'll talk about that after this meeting, because I've got the time to do it, because I kind of I kind of work a day or two shifts. So I've got it set up in the morning, then I kind of allocate an hour and a half after that, for whatever follows up out of that meeting. Make sure they've got what they need to carry on. And that seems to work quite well. But I guess it also depends on the guys you're working with. And, and the kind of work they're doing.

Unknown Speaker 49:40
Yeah, like, like, these things are very, like heavily context based. And like also, like you mentioned, like, it's communication, but like the thing that breaks down and like scaling from like, you know, 20 to like 100 to like 100 like 10,000 or whatever, is literally the thing, it becomes more complex and exponential is communication, and that's the thing that we're trying to like solve is that we don't want to feel at all 100 or 200, or 300, or 400, whatever, we don't want to feel like a corporate, we don't want to feel slow, we don't want to feel like it takes, you have to jump through all these loops. I want to make sure that we're still like, you know, five people in the room launching a startup. And that's it, things are guidelines, but push you to innovate. And, you know, that say, push for context. And think from like a first principle thinking, like, literally our values are about, like, understanding the the facts behind the system, and why the sets and how you could potentially use it to your benefit, to do what you need to do within the space. And when you have a company that wants to build 100 Ventures. And that could potentially mean like three 400 People at minimum, and you know, fast, like, you know, 100 teams, 100 systems, 100, Black product managers trying to do opportunities, station, validate, invalid, value, proposition and validation, aka venture validation. And then, you know, massive teams building these things, but also keeping talents around you as a business and not just feeling like you're a cog in the, you know, a cog in the system. There's like a lot of things that like, you have to like, keep in mind will changing this Bowser and, and to be honest, for me, I do appreciate like with stand ups in the morning, in the afternoon of the two shifts, I think it's really cool way to split this thing. I just honestly, like for my like semi side for our business, I would never see how that like is a scalable mechanic for this no for our focused area, with people around the world, and the number of sheer amount of like stuff that is happening in one venture times like 10 times 100. And that's kind of like where this whole I suppose this is where this all started on speaking up a bit more about like remote leadership and ways of work and, you know, passing on things that like reading up on like, a whole bunch of different companies handbooks, basically, I was like, Well, should we need a handbook? Because we need to effectively communicate like you mentioned 100% down to communication was like, why don't you know, these things? These 20 new people joined engineering and they're like, oh, is this the way you do things? Like when it when a mistake happened? I was like, Yes. Like, here's the piece of like, this is the Pete like the piece of paper here that says what we do, like, I had no idea this existed, okay, shit that's like, let's, let's solve remote onboarding. Here's these videos, use these tutorials. This is courses. This is ways that we know you went through the tutorials and the courses so that you understand the business. Also, we don't want to spend five weeks five months onboarding new because the business is honestly not that big enough to spend all their time to onboard something as basic as you know, like that. So like, we like all of this stuff just started to like, fall in place on realizing how much we had to do to be a remote company, not have copy pasted what we're doing physically, and made it virtual and said, Hey, cool, guys. We were remote now. So I think that's definitely one of the biggest learning curves that we get. Well, yeah, it's big lessons we've learned basically, today.

Ryan Purvis 52:56
Yeah. You mentioned to me about a central log or something, is there something you're using like, slack for something like that, where guys are doing it?

Unknown Speaker 53:05
Yeah, so it's a combination. So it's like, it's like a slack. It's like a slack with a bot, you can make look at something like geek bots, or like daily bots, or whatever. So it's that kind of bots. And then we push the information into a data warehouse that we have. And we have an internal tool that like has access to that, from like a leadership side of things and or teams. And basically, what it does is the bot facilitates the asynchronous communication of when you open up your Slack account, so it doesn't really care. It's not at nine o'clock in the morning, when you open up your account, it will ask you for your update for the day. So like when you start working, basically, which is awesome. And if you like just woke up and you check something, it'll you can say pause for an hour, and it will come back and ask you, if you have out of office on your calendar, it won't ask you in bother you. So like it knows when you are and what that does is it also tests engagement. So like, what we do is, we ask for your stand up notes. And we also ask how you feeling from a certain like factor. And that all gets tied in and we can want it to engagement with the team, we can monitor health, we can potentially start telling like and this all gets streamed into our system against like the timelines and how the timelines are looking. And that also ties into we stream all our good and JIRA stuff to this data warehouse. And we built a lot internal system and allows us to can tie this whole up. And we can actually start I mean, not all of its 100% just yet. But we can start to pull all these data points together. And basically draw a map of figuring out which teams are running effectively from a people centric side of things. And from a project management side of things, and potentially from an engagement side. Because if people aren't engaging as much, there's obviously something that may be sick, be wrong, and we need to go have a conversation and we need to understand what's going on. If the project is delayed and your health checks are low, you know that the team is getting to like maybe potentially a burnout state and you need to jump in and look after them and do something about this leadership. And these are all really important things for teams at scale, but also specifically because of stuff and during COVID Top where life is hard for everyone and it's harder now because of that. And this is where all of this stuff came from And like why it is so important to us, one to look after everyone that like, you know, looks after the company by doing their job, and, you know, and being super passionate about the stuff, but also to make sure that we we design systems that allow us to do this at a much, much larger scale.

Ryan Purvis 55:15
Yeah, no, it's, it's become so important to understand employee wellness and, and also to, I mean, there's that phrase, go, your customers are, its go your users are in this case. You know, having Monday meetings, I've definitely found that I no longer look forward to Well, I never look forward to a long meeting, but but I like a short, quick to the point, you know, 15 minutes, 30 minutes. But I like guys using systems that we that a tool called notions, which is a useful tool. Guys use a board, I can have this meeting, I go to the board, I see what's going on, I get notified, you know, you know, by email, and by notion itself that something's happened. And, you know, the guys get the, get the time to do work. Like they're supposed to be doing their brain work, not doing sort of the corporate, you know, fire drill to put the the PowerPoint slide, to update the status on a project. Yeah, don't need to do that, you know?

Unknown Speaker 56:13
No, like, 100% like, I like, geez, like, I felt it, like, every three months, I feel like meeting fatigue, where I wake up a lot of my calendar and go like, Do I really have to go to all these meetings today, I just really, really don't want to, and with all frustrations and irritations. And this like, it's like, people are so bad, like incubators, like accelerators are, I'm using a long longer example of how I felt, are really like, like, I don't know, they're really bad for like the startup market, because often they're linked to like digital agencies that are just interested in service based work and getting your cash they're not interested in like, is the feature that is being built, going to solve the value proposition or your customer and help the startup grow? Because in early phase, it's all about our customer. It's all about getting acquisitions, right? And that's what really frustrated us. And that led up to conversations with like nearly the CEO and up to conversations with Alex. And this is where like, parts of like, you know, my involvement of Delta began, because I was having visit them, and, you know, steaming about a previous adventure, and like, why things? Why are these things like so bad and why we can't be better, like why we can't do better and be better? Why can we build two inches better? And I found people that have had felt the same way. And we're like, why can't we will be interesting in eight weeks? And why can't they be fully launched and running with customers in three months? And or even shorter than that? Why can't it be more effective and efficient? Why can't we launch more of them and have more chances to make it successful. And all of this stuff came, again, the frustration came, adults, you know, growth of like, what at least my contribution of why I wanted to contribute to something like this came from that frustration, and again, kind of cycled back to now where we are right now, you know, 140 people later, I might have launched like 30 ventures, and we have, you know, 70 in the pipeline. We The next stage is like, realizing the frustrations of meetings and working and having flexibility of working when it suits you versus waking up at, you know, seven or nine or driving to work. And the only thing that's happened is COVID, accelerated this, this, this feeling, and having a company and culture and people that are super talented and super passionate about innovating and taking on and growing. So super big growth, basically, massive growth mindset in our company, and fundamental fundamental of the company. But all of this ties down for you to want to be better for you to want to make the better decisions for the people that work for you. So that they can grow even quicker. They can learn faster that they can be passionate about what they do. So like it all, like I guess slowly threads back into what we're trying to do and what we're trying to achieve. And I suppose in the next six months a year will be something else that I'll be irritated by and fuming about trying to fix potential hopefully. So when I'm done with the asynchronous thing, which I think is probably still gonna take me a long time to get to get right. And I think it's super intuitive and progressive. I mean, we've only just started the approach. We know we need something we how GitLab runs as an example, again, of something in a company I think that does really well.

Ryan Purvis 59:19
No, it's I mean, you're in a great journey. And I think it's something that I think we're all aspiring to, to get onto. Because there's definitely productivity gains by deleting people get on with it as adults to the bits of the best way possible. Is there anything else you want to close off on? Anyway? I mean, hold you or or something like that.

Unknown Speaker 59:43
I mean, yeah, sure. I mean, I guess my you can just drop a link I guess of my LinkedIn into the channel a bit. It is Jared RESNA and I am still kind of posting stuff recently trying to get better at communicating things that we learn Just believe that tech, the tech leadership, especially if I'm a CTO slash technical aspect, and South Africa seems to kind of really keep knowledge together in their own spaces. And I know that a lot of groups and a lot of meetups that are trying to share that, but I do feel that we can do more in the community. And basically, yeah, I do a lot of posting nowadays, and I say a lot, once every two weeks a week. But that's a lot for me. So definitely go check that out. Potentially, if you have chats with me, I'm always keen to further conversations and learn and I actually wish people would engage with me more on this, I can figure out what I'm, like, you know, the thing, like get feedback on why something I thinking is potentially wrong, or a better way to approach it. That'll be amazing. So yeah, I suppose a close up for that. And if you're looking at, you know, partnering and building pinches, I mean, definitely come have a chat, at least the Delta.

Ryan Purvis 1:00:50
Sounds great. Have you had any issues putting yourselves adults through the delta that we're running around?

Unknown Speaker 1:00:57
Honestly, I thought we would. But I don't think I don't think everyone is as paranoid and stuff like that. So I don't think we've like we had, you know, like a Corona branding issue at all. Maybe we started being found on on Google best and I don't know, but no, nothing. Nothing is blocked us from that aspect. Luckily, Oh, that's good.

Ryan Purvis 1:01:17
That's That's good to hear. So

Unknown Speaker 1:01:19
yeah, man, the session, saying, oh, pleasure.

Ryan Purvis 1:01:24
Thank you for your time.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:26
Have a good week. We'll

Ryan Purvis 1:01:27
keep in touch. Thank you for listening. Today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW W podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www dot digital workspace dot works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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